Cryan ‘disappointed’ by Murphy’s conditional veto of bribery bill

State Sen. Joe Cryan (D-Union), the Senate sponsor of a bill applying bribery laws to candidates for political office (rather than just elected officeholders), said today that he was frustrated by Gov. Phil Murphy’s conditional veto of the bill last week. Murphy has justified his decision by saying he wants technical changes to make the bill apply to all individuals involved in a bribe, not just the candidate.

“I’m disappointed in the veto,” Cryan said. “Frankly, I found that the advice and counsel that the governor received seemed to be to the benefit of the attorney general, not to the benefit of the people of the state of New Jersey.”

Cryan added that he was skeptical of the governor’s proposed changes to the bill; the state attorney general’s office has argued that the law already applies to candidates without need of further intervention.

“I don’t plan on moving those amendments, because I don’t think they’re needed,” he said. “We’ll see where we go from here. It’s a very straightforward bill, so there was, in my view, absolutely no reason for a veto.”

The fight to broaden the state’s political bribery laws has been waged by Assemblyman Greg McGuckin (R-Toms River) and several other now-former Republican legislators since 2012, shortly after a U.S. District Court judge found that former Assemblyman Louis Manzo (D-Jersey City) couldn’t be convicted for taking bribes during his 2009 run for Jersey City mayor because he wasn’t an officeholder at the time.

McGuckin and his colleagues continued to reintroduce their bill, which would have prevented rulings like the one in the Manzo case, in every succeeding every session to no avail – even after a nearly identical 2019 case in Bayonne turned up the same ruling. (That ruling was overturned last month by a Superior Court judge who said the law does in fact already apply to unelected candidates.)

In 2021, Cryan joined the bill as a sponsor, at last giving it some momentum in the Senate and among Democrats. And this year, the bill was finally put up for a vote in both chambers, where it passed unanimously.

Murphy’s conditional veto has left three options open: the bill could be amended to meet Murphy’s specifications, Murphy could renege and sign the bill as-is, or the legislature could override the governor. On this last option, Cryan said that he doesn’t “see the reason for a [veto] override.”